what does this button do

Sometimes telling my own story is a challenge. So, after more than 5 years at AP, figuring out what to include in this post and how to write it hasn't been easy. But in the interest of eliminating suspense, I’ll give you the news up front:

I'm joining Google as part of the Design Relations team!

Android Police has been a big part of my life since I first started talking to Artem about contributing back in 2011. I won’t spell out the whole story here - if you want all the gory details I’ll tell you over coffee. But being part of the AP team has given me innumerable opportunities for new experiences, exploration, expression, and friendship.

Hey, did you notice yet? Our other site, APK Mirror, got an update a little while ago. Things are... different. The site's design has been updated, and that means we've made some functional changes too.

We considered renting an all-white studio and some film equipment to tell a heartfelt (and, frankly, heartwarming) story about the new design - about how subatomic particles are related to APK files, how we carefully cut each button out of aircraft grade aluminum, how each material sheet is thinner and lighter than anything you've seen before, or something along those lines. But I couldn't get the budget cleared with Artem in time for this post, so we thought a simpler overview of what we've changed (and fixed) might be better.

In case you missed it, the Google+ app for Android got updated recently to version 7.1.

The update is mostly comprised of bug fixes - 37 bug fixes to be exact - but it also offers fixes for 17 "accessibility issues," a fix for the "keep contacts up to date" setting, and one pretty handy feature that makes the bottom tab bar just a little more useful.

Google added the handy "bell" icon to the YouTube app's channel screens last summer to make signing up for "new upload" notifications quick and painless. But until now, users could only watch the video immediately, or take a shortcut to settings to disable the notification.

Recently though, it seems the YouTube app's upload notifications are gaining a new action - watch later. If you don't want to see the latest video from your favorite channel right this second, you can tap this new action to add it to your Watch Later list on YouTube. Here's a before-and-after shot of the notification:

Filed in the category of "things we just noticed" is a pretty strange interface element discovered in the "help" interface of Google Settings. When opening an article, users can tap a "full screen exit" icon in the toolbar to trigger the little floating window seen above.

The window is reminiscent of the one found in YouTube, where users can collapse a video and keep browsing, but this window can be moved up to the top of the screen as well. Sliding it to either side will dismiss the mini-window. Here's a quick video demo:

There's no doubt this element seems a little out of place in Google Settings, but my first guess is that, functionally, it would serve a similar purpose to YouTube's mini player - if a user is following step-by-step instructions in a help article, they may want a fast way to switch between the steps and the app that they're dealing with.

Something interesting is happening on the Play Store this evening. Users are reporting mysterious "Play Daily" and "Dogfood Apps" buttons appearing on the store's home and apps pages, respectively.

The Play Daily button - at the time of writing - leads to an error page (the app gets a 500 error trying to reach https://android.clients.google.com/fdfe/daily), while the "Dogfood Apps" button leads somewhat predictably to a special apps collection called "Google Apps for Googlers." Inside the collection is, well, a bunch of Google apps including apps from Google Samples like Pie Noon and VoltAir. Worth noting is that the Play Store is not dispensing actual dogfood apps from this collection, just the normal variants that are always exposed to the public.

In case you haven't noticed, there's a new button at the bottom of each post on Android Police these days. The green "subscribe" button appearing across from tags brings new Pushbullet integration to the site, and who doesn't love Pushbullet?